Pita ate until the edge was off her hunger. Then she paused, trying to phrase the question she wanted to ask. She at last decided to be blunt.

“How come you didn’t try anything last night? Is it because I’m…” Pita was going to say ugly, but deliberately sought another word “… because I’m an ork?”

Masaki chuckled and activated a holopic that was held to the fridge with a magnet. “See him?”

Pita nodded, looking at the three-dimensional image. It was of a middle-aged ork, a burly fellow with blond hair and a full, curling beard. “Yeah.”

“That’s a picture of my partner.”

“Your what?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh.” Pita blushed. She’d been thinking of Masaki as a loser who didn’t rate a permanent companion. Now she realized that she’d judged him by appearances, something she’d just accused him of doing to her. It was funny, thinking of someone his age having a “boyfriend.”

She had one other question to ask.

“Carla’s not going to do the story on how Lone Star killed my friends, is she?”

“No,” Masaki admitted after a moment’s silence. “She’s not.”

“Will you?”

Masaki sighed and laid his fork on the table. “No, Pita, I won’t.”

“Why not? Don’t you believe me?”

“I do, actually,” Masaki said. “I believe what you told me over the phone last night. About recognizing the cop who gunned down your friends. He probably is a member of the Humanis Policlub. But we don’t stand a chance against Lone Star. You can’t take on a big corporation like that-not even with KKRU to back you up. They’re just too powerful. They’d find a way to spike the story before it even aired.”

Pita’s nostrils flared. “You’re a coward,” she told him.

Masaki kept his eyes on his breakfast. “Maybe.” He stood up and cleared the empty breakfast packets from the table.

“It’s useless trying to avenge your friends by taking a swing at Lone Star-even a verbal one,” he told her. “That corporation would erase you faster than yesterday’s data. The important thing now is to make sure that bad cop doesn’t get his hands on you again.”

“And what if he gets his hands on another ork kid?” Pita muttered. “Or on your boyfriend?”

Masaki ignored her and tossed the platters in the trash. “I’ll try to arrange a spot for you in a group home in Portland; I’ve got a contact down there who owes me a favor and who can probably put your name at the top of the placement list. Until the visa application comes through, you can stay here.”

“A group home?” Pita curled her lip. She wanted desperately to find a safe haven, but the thought of living in a city full of stuck-up elves and being bossed around by social workers repulsed her. Portland was part of the elven nation of Tir Tairngire, and she’d be even more aware of her physical size among that delicate and slender race. She’d rather stay in Seattle-right here, in Masaki’s comfortable apartment. What did he want to do, get rid of her? He had a boyfriend; maybe he was worried she would cramp his style.

Masaki was still rambling on. “… and don’t leave the apartment. You won’t be able to get back in through the door, and the guard in the lobby won’t let you back into the building if you don’t have a passkey. But feel free to make yourself at home. Use the telecom unit as much as you like, but keep your net browsing confined to the local telecommunications grid and don’t run up any long-distance charges.”

Masaki picked up his magkey and scooped his jacket off the floor. “I’ve got some errands to run. I’ll be back this afternoon. See you then, 0. K.?”

Pita didn’t acknowledge his goodbye or look up when the door closed. She was still burnt about the fact that he’d refused to do the story on Lone Star. If only Yao were still alive. He’d have run the story, then gleefully spat in the eye of any cop who tried to mess with him.

Pita went into the living room and powered up Masaki’s telecom. It didn’t take her long to find confirmation that Yao was indeed dead. On the Public Service Channel, she found a police bulletin, dated three days ago, that noted the shooting death of one ork, male, named Yao Wah. The cops speculated that it had been a mugging; Yao Wah was known to be a pirate broadcaster. It was thought that he’d been killed for his portacam; witnesses saw a troll carrying it away from the scene of the crime. The bulletin wound up with a short description of a suspect that would have matched ninety-nine percent of the trolls in Seattle. The bulletin made no mention of the real killers-the two yakuza who’d actually geeked Yao.

Pita stared at the telecom screen, tempted to dial Tokyo or Paris and chat for an hour or two with whoever answered the phone. She’d show that grumpy old fragger. Not run up any long distance calls, huh? She could bankrupt him in a single morning if she wanted to.

But she didn’t want to. Despite his cowardice, Masaki had been kind to her. He’d been kind to her last night, without any ulterior motive she could think of. He’d let her have the run of this wiz apartment with the awesome view. He’d trusted her. And Pita hadn’t been shown much trust. Not in the past two years of living on the streets. Shopkeepers stared at her, security guards watched her suspiciously every time she walked into a megamall, and pedestrians quickly stuck their hands in their pockets to make sure they still had their wallets when they passed her on the sidewalk. It felt good to have someone look at her without wariness and suspicion. It also felt so good to be clean and dry.

Pita switched on the trideo component, set it to the local broadcasts, and began flipping channels. She crossed to the couch, sank into it, and propped her feet up on the coffee table. She decided to enjoy the good life while she could. You never knew how long it would last.

21

Carla sat at a data display in the KKRU newsroom, scanning the stories that the Scan 'n' Sift program had selected, She'd broadened the scope of her search to include anything to do with Renraku Computer Systems. No telling what the cops had stirred up overnight.

She’d come downtown to the station’s offices. She could have uploaded the information onto her home deck, but she liked the feel of being in the newsroom, even on a slow Saturday, her day off. She found it difficult to work without the hum of the studio’s equipment, the overlapping chatter from the banks of the trideo monitors, and the ebb and flow of reporters’ voices in the background. In the quiet of her apartment it was hard to work up the adrenaline needed to chase down a good story.

And this would be a good story; she had no doubt about it. The system errors and data corruptions had spread, and were hitting different parts of the Matrix all the time. The crashes were increasing in frequency, They were no longer limited to systems that could logically be expected to contain files that included the word Lucifer.

The spirit was infiltrating the Matrix with increasing frequency, and seemed to be drawn to it on some sort of preordained schedule. Judging by the timing of protocol problems, configuration discrepancy problems, and system crashes, it was making its presence known once every hour. According to Aziz, the spirit wouldn’t like being inside the Matrix. In fact, it shouldn’t even be possible for it to enter the Matrix at all. The rigid organization of a computers light-encoding hardware would confine it, would twist it like a four-dimensional pretzel, then spit it out again. But like a moth to the flame, the spirit kept going back. It was in and out again in a mere nanosecond. But in that nanosecond, it could wreak a lot of damage.

So far only Carla, Masaki, and the young decker Corwin knew what the source of the “virus” really was. it wouldn’t be long before other reporters guessed, Carla ached to be first with the story. And to prove that Mitsuhama-the proud purveyor of the latest computer technology-was responsible.